Canadian Typography Archives
Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.
Link tags: ia
1082
On song - Finding my lost voice
The last few times I’ve seen Phil, I’ve really enjoyed chatting to him about the joy of singing together with others. I’m glad he’s written it all down here. It reminds me of Brian Eno’s philosophy on group singing.
ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine
But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker
Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.
Once again, absolutely spot-on analysis from Ted Chiang.
I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.
Artificial intelligence: who owns the future? - ethical.net
Whether consciously or not, AI manufacturers have decided to prioritise plausibility over accuracy. It means AI systems are impressive, but in a world plagued by conspiracy and disinformation this decision only deepens the problem.
ActivityPub is the next big thing in social networks - The Verge
After nearly two decades of fighting for this vision of the internet, the people who believed in federation feel like they’re finally going to win. The change they imagine still requires a lot of user education — and a lot of work to make this stuff work for users. But the fundamental shift, from platforms to protocols, appears to have momentum in a way it never has before.
What The Last of Us, Snowpiercer and ‘climate fiction’ get wrong - BBC Culture
I not only worry that “cli-fi” might not be an effective form of environmental expression – I have come to believe that the genre might be actively dangerous, stunting our cultural ability to imagine a future worth living in or fighting for.
A History Of The World According To Getty Images
A short documentary that you can dowload or watch online:
The film explores how image banks including Getty gain control over, and then restrict access to, archive images – even when these images are legally in the public domain. It also forms a small act of resistance against this practice: the film includes six legally licensed clips, and is downloadable as an HD ProRes file. In this way, it aims to liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and artistic use.
Licensed under aCreative Commons 0: “No rights reserved” license.
The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism
Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.
Designing for colorblindness - The Verge
In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?
Andy describes life online with deuteranopia and dispenses some practical advice for designers:
If there’s any uncertainty, adding labels, icons, or textures to each meaningful color of your design will make it accessible to many more people, regardless of their ability to perceive color.
The search element | scottohara.me
I’ve already add the search element to thesession.org, but while browser support is still rolling out, I’m being extra verbose:
<search role="search">
...
</search>Brought to you by the department of redunancy department.
I’ll remove the ARIA role once browsers are all on board. As Scott says:
Please be aware that this element landing in the HTML spec today does not mean it is available in browsers today. Issues have been filed to implement the search element in the major browsers, including the necessary accessibility mappings. Keep this in mind before you get all super excited and willy nilly add this new element to your pages.
Design notes on the 2023 Wikipedia redesign
So then the question becomes: how do you most effectively communicate designs, to facilitate the best discussions about those designs? My answer is: lots of little prototypes built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns by Thomas Michael Semmler: CSS Developer, Designer & Developer from Vienna, Austria
Call me Cassandra:
The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:
[…] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.
So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.
This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.
What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the “output” is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce “free” iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!
Why aren’t logical properties taking over everything? - Chris Coyier
Good question.
I think it’s mostly inertia.
Some simple ways to make content look good - Set Studio
This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.
God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter | WIRED
Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”
So many gems in this piece by Paul Ford:
The Fediverse apps are all built on a set of rules called the ActivityPub standard, which is a little like HTML had sex with a calendar invite. It’s a content polycule. The questions it evokes are the same as with any polycule: What are the rules? How big can this get? Who will create the chore chart?
Learn Images
Mat has written this free course for you all about images on the web. Covering image formats, responsive images, and workflows, this is one to keep on speed dial.
Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight
The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Network effect
Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is just a tiny part of a concept many have been dreaming about and working on for years. Social media started on the wrong foot. The idea for the read/write web has always been different. Our digital identities weren’t supposed to end up in something like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
Decentralisation, Federation, The Indie Web: There were many groups silently working on solving the broken architecture of our digital social networks and communication channels – long, long before the “web 3” dudes tried to reframe it as their genius new idea.
I’ve been a part of this for many years until I gave up hope. How would you compete against the VC money, the technical and economical benefits of centralised platforms? It was a fight between David and Gloiath. But now Mastodon could be the stone.